And so it begins (again)...

[akk]

"Star Trek is the second oldest fandom in existence. [...] I honestly don't think you can bring a new idea to the fandom. We've seen it all before, really. [...] you'll need more than a gimick to keep our attention [...] If you want us to respect you [...]"
[source: http://community.livejournal.com/fanficrants/8227664.html]

I am fan enough to have spent a fortune on tapes to record the various series when they -finally- aired on German TV. And I freely admit that I loved TOS and some of the later installments (though not TNG, with few humoresque exceptions). But to start writing means to treat into new territory. You have to learn the symbolism, the characters, and you will make mistakes until you figure things out. Therefore, statements like the one quoted above made me never to touch anything remotely StarTrek fanwise with anything but a very long pole. It certainly kept me from ever writing it (ever since the '90s).
Whether that's been good or bad (for me or ST) we'll never know, but it certainly allows me now to grab the e-popcorn, lean back and watch the battle to unfold. To quote one of the fashion entertainers in the -admittedly abysmal- model shows on German TV:

"Drama, baby, drama!" [*eg*]

Comments

[jjblue1.livejournal.com]

Jeez, this is depressing. I'm not into ST but I read the whole rant and it reminded me of similar rants I read for YnM or X so I'm kind of used to it... and this is also why I rarely post works on communities...
Honestly I don't see why old fans are supposed to be better than new fans just because they're old. Sure, being new to a fndom might give you some disadvantage, you might have missed a bit of canon (but that's not FOR SURE, you could have done your homeworks well also), you hadn't spent as much time wondering about the characters and you might have lost your chance to read old fanwork not anymore available on the net or take part to old discussions but this doesn't mean old fans are Gods.
They might have failed to understand the characters completely. But maybe that's just me being bitter about this kind of unwelcoming rants...

[akk]

It's not about old fans being better in my eyes. It's about the hostility towards newbies. We all started at a point and we all made our silly beginners mistakes and we all suffer from limited access to canon material.
What's sad in my eyes is that it keeps people from even trying and thus some good works from being written.

[jjblue1.livejournal.com]

*nods* It also made some people distance form a fandom. I know of fans who felt unwelcomed and left the X fandom because they couldn't deal with this kind of things. I don't like this kind of things...

[akk]

Neither do I. It seems ungrateful in my eyes.
I received a nice welcome in the fandoms I'm active in and I certainly try to give the same to others in return. If there's stuff I dislike or feel too repetitive, I might not engage in the argument or point to the places where it's been dealt with before, but I certainly don't say "You're too new to have an opinion about that!".

What irks me most is this "all good ideas have been told" notion in these rants. They make me think of Arthur C. Clarke's short story "Reverie" (first published 1939, *well* before StarTrek). It starts with the statement "All the ideas in science fiction have been used up!" and then takes two pages to entirely discredit it, ending with "What it needs is not more imagination or even less imagination. It is some imagination."
[The story is part of ACC's "The collected stories" paperback as well.]

[jjblue1.livejournal.com]

I agree!

LOL If all the ideas have been told then the whole world would stop writing and making movies and so on considering we've more than 2000 years of storytelling, way more than the ST fans can hope to have.
Sure, maybe it's a bit difficult to find something ABSOLUTELY unique nobody had ever thought before but still I think there's still enough new in many works to be enough new. So if humans still have tales to tell after 2000 years of productions why ST fans should have already used up all their bullets?
Maybe a person might have used up all his own, have lost interest in the fandom but... a whole fandom? huge as the ST one? Wish so much material as the ST one? It doesn't seem believable.
... and I wonder if the story you mentioned had been printed in my country because you made me curious...

[akk]

That's actually pretty much the argument ACC followed in his story. :)

I can't help you search for it, since I don't speak Italian. But ACC is a worldwide translated author and his short stories are very popular. I think your chances aren't that bad.
If you can't get it in Italian, you might want to try it in English. He writes a very good English prose that's still not difficult to read. I started reading him while I was still in school.
This is the book I have: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Stories_of_Arthur_C._Clarke It's been published in 2001. So you might be lucky on ebay or in second hand bookshops. :)

[jjblue1.livejournal.com]

LOL Then I guess we think the same! ^_^

I'll keep my fingers crossed then and t to find him next time I manage to get into a libray!

[ranalore]

Huh. First, Star Trek is arguably the second-oldest media-based modern fandom in existence, but shorthanding that to "second oldest fandom in existence" is incorrect. Someone should do their homework before ranting. Also, someone should learn to spell canon. It's a different kind of weapon.

[akk]

Indeed.
I also bemourn the hostily created towards newbies and this "all good ideas have been told" makes me want to scream. I'd throw Arthur C. Clarke's short story collection at them - his story "Reverie" from 1939 discredits that to a T (not Tiberius) - , but I love that book too much.

[ranalore]

I paraphrase something CJ Cherryh told me over breakfast once many years ago: Being original isn't saying something new. It's saying something true in your own voice.

[akk]

And that's difficult enough even without being told it's inferior before you even opened your mouth.

Cherryh... come to think of it, the first fantasy novel I ever read was "The Dreamstone", still in its German translation. I later reread it in the original, when my English caught up with my curiosity. Its characters even inspired two of my pastel chalk images. Small world. :)

[ranalore]

I write horror poetry. If I cared about what people thought was "inferior" in writing, I'd have quit a long time ago. Also, there's the whole issue where fanfiction itself is not exactly considered the height of literature. I think that attitude is bullshit, too, but it does make me roll my eyes especially hard when any fanfic author starts throwing terms like "original" around.

I'm a big fan of Cherryh's, so being able to talk to her was a real treat.

[akk]

"If I cared..."
Nowadays me, ditto. I didn't think twice about starting in X, which is an old, sometimes cranky fandom all by itself. But I remember the first cautious steps into Galaxy Rangers well enough, which was a small fandom with nice people back then (without their patience, my English wouldn't be as it is now) and I detest the hostily.
However, by not being involved in ST (and still knowing the canon acceptably), it was/is entertaining to see the "canon wars" breaking off in plain reflex to any scrap of new content being published. Now, if they just learned to keep the newbies out of it, instead of marking them can(n)on-fodder in their declaration of war.

*sigh* A lot of people consider fanfiction not literature at all, forgetting that the majority of the novels published each year are not high literature by any standards, either. But then, they never bothered to search past the crap.

Cherryh: I bet. :)

[ranalore]

it was/is entertaining to see the "canon wars" breaking off in plain reflex to any scrap of new content being published

It just makes me impatient, especially when it's phrased as though new fans (who are often old fans just getting into the fanworks-producing side of this particular fandom, so they know what's out there) shouldn't bother writing, because it's all been done before. You know what's been done before? Someone travelling back in time to change the course of events, and creating an alternate reality thereby. Destroying planets in retaliation for real or perceived wrongs has been done before. Hell, cowboys in space had already been done before Gene Roddenberry conceived of either Christopher Pike or James Kirk. So, "It's been done, don't bother" is seriously one of the most bullshit arguments against any fiction ever, and especially fanfiction.

A lot of people consider fanfiction not literature at all

They don't, and that's often got less to do with the quality than the derivation, even if they phrase it as though it's a quality question. I suspect the phrasing is in part because an author who has used Arthuriana in her novel knows she's treading on shaky ground if she tries to claim that what's bad about fanfiction is that it uses characters set in a universe someone else created.

[akk]

Well, with Trek it's:
New material being rumored... *squeak*
New material being leaked... *squeal* and/or *ugh, that breaks continuity (which is broken in itself)*
New material being published... *Full Out War* until the a) the next rumor or b) the fandom newbies growing old enough to perpetuate the notion of "we against *those imbecile babies* (whatever happens first).

The arguments don't change, only the protagonists and the acronym. ;)

"I suspect the phrasing..."
Likely, though laziness is probably part of the picture. If they condemn it as "not being literature", they don't have to consider it, don't have to come up with arguments, justifications, proper analysis, etc. pp. They can just crinkle their nose and ignore it, while placing their coffee mug on a welly volume of reader's digest, coming conveniently on paper instead of on screen.

[ranalore]

You've just encapsulated the fannish cycle of any open canon. *G*

Likely, though laziness is probably part of the picture.

Not as much, in my experience. Granted, I mostly run in genre circles, but it's often a case of attempting to raise the legitimacy of what they're doing by pointing to this other thing over here as "not real writing." It's the same principle as the fannish, "My kink is okay, your kink is sick and wrong."

coming conveniently on paper instead of on screen

Even proponents of e-publishing and online publishing venues fall prey to dismissal of the entire category of fanfiction, though. It's a particularly lively push-pull as more neopros and semi-pros let our media fannish ties be known. We're all supposed to be ashamed of that sort of thing, you know.

[akk]

Well, I know more the picture in Germany and there is a tendency to just label new media as irrelevant. The same argument is used in (political) bloggers vs. print media over here, for example. Amusingly, a slight difference is in contemporary authors. Quite a number of them have their own webside or blog and seek interaction with their readership. But then, fiction in Germany has long been ruled by "a literature papst" (Marcel Reich-Ranicki) and whoever's not Günther Grass (at least!) has no chance of getting a favorable critic.

Online and e-publishing has no root in my country (sadly). Last year took a new effort to create a market for ebooks, but the conditions the publishing houses set (prizing that of a paper copy - 2 Euros *shakes head* and promising to prosecute any ebook found online) makes it highly unlikely that the technology will take hold any time soon.

I noticed the notion of "to be ashamed, you thief!" Their problem. I caught books on paper decidedly worse than most fics. Poor trees, their lives went to waste.

[ranalore]

There are writers on the U.S. scene who dismiss the entirety of e-publishing, but they're generally recognized as throwbacks. Which is not to say sensibilities have caught up with the technology in any way. There's still a certain stigma attached to any but traditional publishing formats, and that perception is only changing slowly.

Fanfic isn't condemned for the technology involved, though fandom as a whole has been more accepting of new publishing formate than the rest of the reading public (and you can find articles lamenting the rise of web-publishing in fandom; google The Fanfic Symposium for a good example). Fanfic is condemned for being derivative. Given that the most vehement critics are authors of tie-in novels and Tolkien ripoffs, the condemnation is particularly idiotic.

[akk]

Perception often changes slowly, but at least it *is* changing. Otherwise, all reliable documents would still be carved in stone and we'd all have back problems after reading the morning slate. I admit, I still prefer the tactile feeling of a paperback to an ebook, but that has more to do with the switching of pages taking too long as to allow flipping back and forth through the book. I wait for improvements on that regard.

I know that fanfic is disregarded as derivative, ignoring the fact that virtually all works are derivative in various ways (not only the obvious ones like tie-in novels). It's just similar to what is thought about bloggers over here. Or graphic novels a few years back. By now graphic novels have been on bestselling lists and are discussed in literature circles (though not by Mr. Reich-Raniki *g*), a few years back they were considered smears on wasted paper catering for those geeks, who failed to grow up. Graphic novels have made it, comics are on the way, and fanfic is basically in the phase of "being noticed" by "normals" (a.k.a. the amorph mainstream). We'll see what happens. :)

[sabriel75]

Bloody brilliant observation and sage advice.

[tamchronin]

The very first fanfic I wrote to share with others was for a ST zine a friend of a friend was putting together back in high school. I never actually followed through and got it published, but I'll never forget the experience.

I read the whole wank, and I shook my head. It really is exactly what kept me from joining Trek fandom, rather than just being a fan. What stunned me was the revelation that the fanbrat posting the rant was in his 20s. I'm going to be 35 later this year. These are the people who chased me away?

It gives me a perverse urge to throw out some badfic and post it in as many ST communities as I can, just so I can laugh at the head-popping that would happen among the elitist fanbrats like that one. I've been an ST fan since before he was born (my parents are fen as well, and they started me young.) I just don't have the energy these days, no matter how amusing the mental image is.

(Hi, by the way. I don't think we've spoken much directly before. Nice to see you. ^_^)

[akk]

My first fanfic was actually inspired by Robin of Sherwood, but it received so much personal input that it was an origfic with no connection to the actual universe in the end. The first true fanfic was for Galaxy Rangers. It was still written with paper & typewriter. No chance to publish it before I got online in the 90s, almost ten years later.

I had ideas for several fandoms back then, but German fandoms weren't really "online" yet and with English being my second language, I was conscious about posting in English. I certainly looked at the people active in those to determine where to risk putting my foot in. Esp. since it was likely that I would misunderstood even common comments in the beginning. School English helps with stories about kittens, it certainly leaves you in the lurch when it comes to slang & lolcats. ;)

These days, I consider the frequent "canon Trek Wars" as a form of entertainment, superior to the canon they are about. (And ST does have some of the sweetest villains. Romulans, Cardassians... ;)

Hi. :) Nice to meet you, too. I wanted to say "hello" when I subscribed to your journal here, but somehow it slipped my mind while resolving importing issues, payment issues, thesis issues... I'm sorry to have been accidentally rude. I subscribed mostly because I enjoyed some of your TBX fics, before I started writing X myself. (I stop reading fics when I write in a fandom to avoid influences.))